Why neither climate change nor coronavirus will end civilization

More than a few thinkers believe that climate change and the coronavirus have a lot in common. Whether these individuals are explaining what the coronavirus is exposing about the climate movement in Politico Magazine or writing on the parallels between the coronavirus and the climate crisis in the Boston Globe, the comparisons in the media continue on.

As tempting as it is to compare climate change to the coronavirus, efforts to do so will strain both logic and common sense. The two problems differ in fundamental nature, the kind of costs they impose, and the appropriate governmental response. It is worth noting, however, that climate change and the coronavirus certainly do have some things in common.

Both present serious problems that require broad global responses, have significant human tolls, and imply economic tabs worth trillions of dollars. Both bring out groups from the ends of the political spectrum who make unwise claims to either ignore the problem or use it to exert government control over everything. But that is where the similarities end.

The obvious difference is the nature of the problems. Climate change is a chronic condition. The coronavirus, however, is an acute event. The costs of climate change will run up in the next century. Absent unprecedented technological breakthroughs, there is no clear stopping point for dealing with climate change. The costs of the coronavirus are due now and have caused a severe recession. A treatment, effective vaccine, or global herd immunity will represent an unambiguous end to the problem.

Many of the actions necessary to respond to climate change may provide benefits to society. Making clean energy sources such as wind, solar, and nuclear power cheaper than polluting fossil fuels will generate significant benefits and is worth doing over time. Some ideas like moving buildings out of those areas likely to flood are only incidentally important because of climate change and should have really been done long ago.

On the other hand, the benefits of responding to the coronavirus mostly are a matter of becoming much better prepared for future pandemics or perhaps some advancements in medical research. It is difficult to think of many sustainable ways of turning the response to the coronavirus into a win for society whereas it is easy to do so for climate change.

Finally, the appropriate government response to the two crises is different. The sheer complexity, endless time horizon, and lack of any single feasible solution for climate change makes the problem almost impossible to solve by central command. Because it involves the vastly complex system of the atmosphere, no group of experts can gather together all of the knowledge needed to solve climate change or even to calculate its costs.

Efforts to encourage innovation, withdraw maladaptive subsidies, and let everyone solve the problem together are much more likely to succeed as command and control efforts almost never work for such complex issues. But the problem posed by the coronavirus is exactly the type of thing for which we have a government. While it is desirable to have different teams involved, developing drugs and vaccines is a capital intensive and central process that will happen far more quickly if it gets subsidized.

Closing businesses by government mandate likewise requires significant spending to prop up the economy. Preventing the spread of the disease requires some use of police power. A smaller government can help deal with climate change. But at least temporarily, the coronavirus requires a bigger government in some areas of life. Neither climate change nor the coronavirus will end human civilization. Both problems have huge costs, but dealing with each one implies using very different tactics.

Eli Lehrer serves as the president of the R Street Institute in Washington.